monolith, is above the line of eternal snow.  Yet while all its giant neighbors have the look of being built of solid snow, from their waists up, the Matterhorn stands black and naked and forbidding, the year round, or merely powdered or streaked with white in places, for its sides are so steep that the snow cannot stay there.  Its strange form, its august isolation, and its majestic unkinship with its own kind, make it—­so to speak—­the Napoleon of the mountain world.  “Grand, gloomy, and peculiar,” is a phrase which fits it as aptly as it fitted the great captain.

Think of a monument a mile high, standing on a pedestal two miles high!  This is what the Matterhorn is—­a monument.  Its office, henceforth, for all time, will be to keep watch and ward over the secret resting-place of the young Lord Douglas, who, in 1865, was precipitated from the summit over a precipice four thousand feet high, and never seen again.  No man ever had such a monument as this before; the most imposing of the world’s other monuments are but atoms compared to it; and they will perish, and their places will pass from memory, but this will remain. [1]

1.  The accident which cost Lord Douglas his life (see
    Chapter xii) also cost the lives of three other men. 
    These three fell four-fifths of a mile, and their bodies
    were afterward found, lying side by side, upon a glacier,
    whence they were borne to Zermatt and buried in the
churchyard. 
    The remains of Lord Douglas have never been found. 
    The secret of his sepulture, like that of Moses, must remain
    a mystery always.

A walk from St. Nicholas to Zermatt is a wonderful experience.  Nature is built on a stupendous plan in that region.  One marches continually between walls that are piled into the skies, with their upper heights broken into a confusion of sublime shapes that gleam white and cold against the background of blue; and here and there one sees a big glacier displaying its grandeurs on the top of a precipice, or a graceful cascade leaping and flashing down the green declivities.  There is nothing tame, or cheap, or trivial—­it is all magnificent.  That short valley is a picture-gallery of a notable kind, for it contains no mediocrities; from end to end the Creator has hung it with His masterpieces.

We made Zermatt at three in the afternoon, nine hours out from St. Nicholas.  Distance, by guide-book, twelve miles; by pedometer seventy-two.  We were in the heart and home of the mountain-climbers, now, as all visible things testified.  The snow-peaks did not hold themselves aloof, in aristocratic reserve; they nestled close around, in a friendly, sociable way; guides, with the ropes and axes and other implements of their fearful calling slung about their persons, roosted in a long line upon a stone wall in front of the hotel, and waited for customers; sun-burnt climbers, in mountaineering costume, and followed by their guides and porters, arrived from time to time, from breakneck expeditions among the peaks and glaciers of the High Alps; male and female tourists, on mules, filed by, in a continuous procession, hotelward-bound from wild adventures which would grow in grandeur very time they were described at the English or American fireside, and at last outgrow the possible itself.